97. Crepuscular lights

One of my earliest memory, I must have been three, perhaps four, is about amazing red lights gyrating in a room. I woke up one night in a bed that wasn’t mine. My parents’ I guess. I’m alone. The window of that room faces the street. Although the glass panel is covered by wooden slats, fiery flashes of light find their way in.

Noise must have interrupted my sleep. Metallic sounds from the hallway. The room’s door is shut tight. I can still hear voices, loud, urgent, from far away, probably from the kitchen at the back of the apartment. Despite the distance, they’re audible, I even think they might be shouts. But all I care about through that din are these red lights gushing through the blinds above the bed.

The rays move in rapid sweeps against the ceiling and the walls. I’ve never seen that before. It’s so beautiful. Everything around me becomes a bright rare red. A colored transparency that instantly shares its tint with whatever it touches. It comes and goes, swiftly turns in the room. I’m blown away by so much splendor. By the dazzling whirlwind in front of my eyes. It’s extremely bright, but not blinding. It’s powerful, but not scary. It’s omnipresent, but takes no space.

As the red light brushes against every object in the room, it highlights them with an exact sanguine contour. Every detail goes from darkness to a clear crimson presence. Everything flickers, winks. Bits and pieces blinking around me, while wide stripes of red glide in a circling movement on larger surfaces.

I’m in that bed and feel absolutely privileged to witness such luminous apparitions. To discover that red can be like that, slashing and unreserved. An unquestionable color, decisive, thorough. Outright clear and manifest. Of course, at that very young age, I don’t have that many words, but that’s the way I feel.

I’m so proud of the experience that I tell myself that’s all I need to know for now.

I’ll ignore the commotion outside the bedroom. I won’t acknowledge there’s an ambulance by our front door. That my mother is being taken away on a stretcher screaming, once again for it’s a pattern. Not the stretcher, but the ear-piercing laments that she’s about to die.

It’s usually my fault. But not that night. I was asleep. I couldn’t have done that. I’m sure I’m blameless, therefore I can fully enjoy the lights without any other thoughts. I’m free. No responsibilities. I can be sensitive to the dancing bright color. Even believe it's there for my sole amusement.

Better still: The world outside the room sounds so busy, turbulent, a raucous affair, that so occupied it will leave me alone, totally forget about me at least as long as the red beams keep their glaring pace. So I pray for the light show never to end.

I’m telling you about this incident because as I grew older, I became quite interested in the visible spectrum. I studied it, fascinated by that precise range of shades the human eye can perceive. I made collages out of my passion. In a table of opposites, black is juxtaposed to white, but to me, it was always red, the longest wavelength we can discern. It’s our extreme. The end of our ocular journey. We can go no further. When you see the color red, you are at the boundary of your visual space.

In terms of atmospheric optics, the red crepuscular rays that had entered the room I was in that night, these twisting shafts of lights adorning the walls and furniture, they were like the safelight in a photographer’s darkroom. Allowing the view to unfurl with immunity. It had meant security, refraction and scattering of distress, columns of sheltering light. Streaming through the gaps in the window, that luminosity had radiated around the dawn and the dusk of nightmares. Penetrating, finding holes in blackness. It had made the shadows flush. Given a rich ruby glow to all I could see.

That’s why so many of my collages are in red. I thought you might want to know, how much I appreciate that color. Beyond it, I'm sightless.

Laolao